Leveraging Political Messaging with Religious Resonance: A Transitivity Analysis Of the Easter Address of a Ghanaian President

Religion and politics are inextricably connected through shared values, institutional influence, and historical relationships, culminating in what can be described as politics in religion and religion in politics. During key religious festivities, political actors deliver messages to the members of the religious community. Thus, the present study employed a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approach to examine the transitivity choices in the 2021 Easter speech by former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (PNADAA) to reveal the interplay between political messaging and religious resonance. By employing the transitivity pattern of process and participants, the study showed how PNADAA revealed his political and religious ideologies. Material clauses were used to address pressing concerns while at the same time resonating with shared religious beliefs around the themes of hope and the principle of compassion, commitment, and communal welfare. Verbal and relational clauses were used to engender rapport and credibility with the Christian community while echoing religiously inspired motifs of renewal and redemption. With echoes from the religious concepts of faith, perseverance, and endurance, the mental clauses were employed to acknowledge the challenging times while the existential clauses simultaneously blended the religious themes of health and life preservation with the government’s commitment to safeguarding public safety during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study has implications for theorizing the interconnection among discourse, politics, and religion. Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), political discourse, religious discourse, Easter speech, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)